Still, mere mimesis was never enough for Wallace. In a 1993 interview with literary critic Larry McCaffery, Wallace explains that if the contemporary condition really is “hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic and stupid,” then writers can “get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid,” characterized exclusively by “lists of brand-name consumer products.” In this way, “bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world.”[8] For Wallace, this isn’t enough. Literature has also to suggest a means of redemption, of getting beyond the bare, flat surfaces of shallow/hollow postmodernism. Really “good fiction,” for Wallace, will depict this surface world, and still manage to “illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.” Wallace’s 1989 novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way, which remember, I said I was writing an essay about, is useful for understanding how Wallace conceived of this project and first attempted to reconcile its contradictions. Wallace’s target in Westward is not just a postmodern condition in which surface has replaced depth, gratification has replaced self-actualization, and the capitalist market has replaced, well, most everything, he’s also taking aim at the aesthetic tradition that arises from and within those conditions—postmodernism and postmodern ‘metafiction’ in particular. Westward enacts Wallace’s conflicted relationship to his postmodern forbearers. Its protagonist, a young writer who “regards metafiction the way a hemophiliac regards straight razors,” struggles to evade the influence of his writing instructor, a renowned metafictionist, who he listens to but doesn’t trust. “Even when he doesn't listen to him,” says Wallace’s narrator, “he’s consciously reacting against the option of listening, and listens for what not to listen to.” The whole thing is a narrative manifestation of Bloomian anxiety (of Influence), and also a fairly gruesome bit of literary patricide—Fiction Murder One.[9]
[8] He offers Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho as an example of this kind of thing.
[9] Which, i.e. the whole Oedipal thing, is amplified by Wallace’s ambivalence, his sense of gratitude, even love, toward the targets of his wrath. This love-slash-hate dynamic makes the coup de grâce all the more painful and gratuitous, in the way a murder of passion always winds up more violent and messy than a cold-blooded assassination.